Fine interwiki

This is an essay. It expresses the opinions and ideas of some Wikimedians but may not have wide support. This is not policy on Meta, but it may be a policy or guideline on other Wikimedia projects. Feel free to update this page as needed, or use the discussion page to propose major changes.

Traditional approach to interlanguage links is to establish an equivalence relation (bidirectional links with transitivity) between articles in different languages such that no different articles in the same language should be equivalent. This implies no duplicate links, and that we may not able to walk to another article of chosen language only via interwiki. Some minor deviations were considered there. Here a new semantic model of interlanguage links is proposed, essentially asymmetric, but based on existing MediaWiki functionality. It may deal with very complicated interlanguage links entanglement.

Because of transitivity, there is an equivalence relation of entities, indirectly connected in both directions. In simple cases it exactly corresponds to our old interwiki concept.

If two entities in the same language is equivalent in the sense of the relation above, then either they must be the same identity or one must redirect to another. So, no essentially distinct entities in one language may be equivalent.

If we factorize entities by the equivalence above and drop all loops, then the rest will form a directed acyclic graph (more correctly, a multigraph, because some links would duplicate). Ban on directed cycles in this formulation is not a separate requirement, but a consequence of requirements above – if a directed cycle exists, then all its entities are equivalent. So, there is a partial ordering of indirect thematic inclusion.

Linked articles on different articles may have the same scope and be equivalent, but not necessary. Any language decide itself how to order the content.